The INFLUENCERS project officially started on the 1st of September 2019, it will last 24 months and its activities and outputs will be implemented by 6 partners: Jugendförderverein Parchim Lübz e.V. (the project coordinator from Germany), The Rural Hub (Ireland), Solution (France), Active Women Association (Poland), Rightchallenge (Portugal) and INNOVADE (Cyprus).
The objective of INFLUENCERS is to foster the inclusion of youth living with disabilities. INFLUENCERS partners are exploring the idea of using social entrepreneurship as a bridge to inclusion for people on the margins of mainstream society, focusing specifically on youth living with a disability or a long-term health condition. Given the right tools, the project consortium believes that the youth with first-hand knowledge of living with a disability or a long-term health condition can become successful social media influencers and a reference for other young people living with the same condition.
To achieve its ambitious objectives, INFLUENCERS will develop the following online resources focusing on social entrepreneurship:
- An Online Social Entrepreneurship Curriculum for youth living with a disability on how to develop their social entrepreneurship idea into a sustainable entity.
- A Digital & Social Media Literacy Curriculum on how to stay safe in online environments and a suite of media-rich resources to build digital and social media literacy.
- An In-service training programme to introduce Best Practice Guidelines for youth providers on supporting the inclusion of young persons with disabilities
- An online environment to support the new young social entrepreneurs to launch their online careers.
The INFLUENCERS kickoff meeting was hosted by The Rural Hub in its office in Virginia (Ireland) on the 17th of October and allowed the partners to kickoff the project and to meet each other and to take important decisions about the project first steps.